Oct 25, 2013; Memphis, TN, USA; Houston Rockets center Dwight Howard (12) guards Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol (33) during the first quarter at FedExForum. Mandatory Credit: Justin Ford-USA TODAY Sports
Announcers, media, and coaches alike frequently chime in on the lack of quality shooting guards in the league, and how scarce the position is. Much has been also said about how the NBA is currently seeing a golden age of point guards. Are these ideas true? Should general managers overpay for quality talent at shooting guard? Are the point guards of today’s NBA really that impressive? Can we measure positional scarcity? In order to evaluate these claims, I looked at the RAPM (regularized adjusted plus minus) of every NBA player-season from 1991 to 2014, and tried to evaluate just how rare quality at each position was.
Using RAPM from Jeremias Engelmann and positional assignments from Basketball-Reference, I calculated multiple slices of mean and median RAPM per position and year, as well as the count and percentage of the players at each position with an overall RAPM above or equal to 0. The table below details the percentage of players at or above 0 RAPM at each position, year over year.
And this table details the mean RAPM among those players with an overall RAPM at or above 0.
The idea that shooting guards are currently scarce seems to be true. Last year, the shooting guard position had the lowest percentage of players with a positive RAPM (26.17%), even though more players were classified as shooting guards than any other position (107 players). This 26.17% is actually above average for the shooting guard position when compared to the position’s history, but the recent years of 2008 through 2013 have all seen a lower-than-positional-average level of positive RAPM. Though the percentage of positively impactful shooting guards was smaller than other positions last year, the quality of those shooting guards at the top wasn’t far removed from the quality of the other four positions in 2014. In fact, the shooting guards had an average RAPM of 1.64, very close to last year’s overall average of 1.61. The current scarcity of quality at shooting guard is due more to the small number of players that register a positive RAPM value, rather than a lack of relative quality at the top of the position.
The idea that this is a golden age of point guards is also true. Not only was the average RAPM of players at the top of the point guard position relatively high compared to the other positions, but 37.65% of NBA point guards had RAPM values above 0 last year, the highest such value for point guards in all the years that RAPM is publicly available (1991-2014). Not only are point guards quite good right now, but there are quite a lot of them, and there has seemingly never been so much.
This study is not without its flaws. Position assignments are quite arbitrary, and RAPM also tends to prefer big men over smaller players. Even though the percentage of positively contributing point guards has never been this high, it’s hard to say that this is a golden age of point guards when there has recently been a similarly large quantity of bigs producing very high levels of RAPM. An interesting topic of future study would see similar methodology applied to players classified by non-traditional positions; positions determined by statistical factors of production, efficiency, and style; so that the noise of traditional position assignment could be eliminated. For now, it appears that solid shooting guards are indeed rare, and that the amount of good point guards in this league has never been higher.